The Man Behind Earth Day: Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson

From NelsonEarthDay.net:

Gaylord Nelson, the ambitious junior senator from Wisconsin, grew accustomed to disappointment in the 1960s. In his first Senate speech, supporting a bill banning phosphates in detergents, he insisted that "we need this...just as desperately as we need the defense against atomic missiles." That did not stop his fellow legislators from voting down the bill, just as similar pleas could not win him a single co-sponsor for his 1966 bill banning DDT. While he was able to lure President Kennedy to take a "conservation tour" of Wisconsin and the West in 1963, he watched helplessly as the President, the press, and audiences preferred to debate taxes and Cold War politics.

To wake up Washington, he would need a new plan.

The idea came to him in August of 1969 after surveying the oil spill in Santa Barbara. For the past few years, college students had been staging teach-ins to educate their campuses about the war in Vietnam. What if, Nelson wondered, students used the same forum to raise environmental awareness, and what if they coordinate their events to fall on the same day, grabbing headlines and sending a strong environmental message to the Capitol? He proposed the idea in front of a small, fledgling conservation group in Seattle on September 20. A short wire story broadcast the idea.

Seven months later Nelson's idea resulted in the largest demonstration in U.S. history. Millions of Americans observed Earth Day in April 1970, whether in groups of tens of thousands in New York or Philadelphia or with events big and small at thousands of colleges and schools across the country. While Nelson with his staff worked tirelessly to promote the day and coordinate select events, he would grow fond of saying Earth Day "organized itself." Nelson encouraged all Americans to celebrate the day "in any way they want."

For the first time, the Earth Day stage gathered together the diverse constituents of the modern environmental movement: youthful idealists, liberal Democrats, middle-class women, scientists, professionals, and representatives of conservation groups, labor unions, and churches.

Addressing the Earth Day 1970 audience in Denver, Nelson proclaimed, "Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human being and all living creatures."

Click here to watch videos of Gaylord Nelson speaking about the environment and Earth Day.

New Bird Species Discovered in Madagascar

From Mongabay.com

The rich and unique biodiversity of Madagascar has a new member: a forest dwelling bird in the rail family, dubbed Mentocrex beankaensis. In 2009 US and Malaygasy scientists conducted a survey in Madagascar's dry Beanka Forest. They discovered several new species, of which the new rail is the first to be described.

"This bird they’ve known about for decades, but no one has been able to go find it and get a specimen of it," said Nick Block, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who studied the new birds molecular genetic told the Chicago Sun Times, describing the new species as 'not common at all'.

Similar to another Malagasy rail, researchers were able to show Mentocrex beankaensis is a new species with taxonomic and DNA studies.

The dry Beanka forests, where the species survived, rest on limestone, which in some cases have formed dramatic spires. The Beanka forest protected area is currently managed by Biodiversity Conservation Madagascar (BCM).

"We [BCM] have taken an approach to the conservation of the Beanka Forest resting on working in unison with local people to fulfill aspects of their economic and development needs and bestowing a sense of natural patrimony of the organisms that live in their forest. These are aspects critical for any long-term successful project. The discovery of this new species of bird and other organisms during the late 2009 expedition underlines the importance of our mission and the uniqueness of the Beanka Forest," the director of BCM, Aldus Andriamamonjy, said in a press release.



Artist's view of the Mentocrex beankaensis. Illustration by: Velizar A. Simeonovski. CITATION: Steve M. Goodman, Marie Jeanne Raherilalao, and Nicholas L. Block. Patterns of morphological and genetic variation in the Mentocrex kioloides complex (Aves: Gruiformes: Rallidae) from Madagascar, with the description of a new species. Zootaxa. 2776: 49-60 (2011).

Is There Really an "Aflockalypse?" It's Not the One in the News.

From Cornell Lab of Ornithology - January 24, 2011

Ever since blackbirds fell from the sky in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, the Cornell Lab has continued to receive numerous inquiries from the media and the concerned public about the significance of that event and other reports of dead birds at locations around the world. These isolated events, although dramatic, are not highly unusual in frequency or scale. Within the United States, for example, the USGS has recorded 188 events during the past 10 years involving more than 1,000 birds per incident--about 18 events per year on average, or more than one per month, attributed to disease and other causes.

"Although wildlife die-offs always pose a concern, they are not all that unusual," said Jonathan Sleeman, director of the USGS NWHC in Madison, Wis., which is completing its analyses of the Arkansas and Louisiana birds. "It's important to study and understand what happened in order to determine if we can prevent mortality events from happening again."

In 2010, the USGS NWHC documented eight die-off events of 1,000 or more birds. The causes: starvation, avian cholera, Newcastle disease and parasites, according to Sleeman. Such records show that, while the causes of death may vary, events like the red-winged blackbird die-off in Beebe, Ark., and the smaller one near Baton Rouge, La., are more common than people may realize.

Should we be worried about an "aflockalypse?" Yes, but not about the media coverage focusing on isolated events that affect only a few hundred or thousand birds at a time. It's the constant, chronic losses from habitat destruction and other causes that should truly concern us. Consider that 100 million birds are estimated to die from window collisions in the United States alone each year. That's more than 270,000 per day on average. Cats are estimated to kill another 100 million per year. And that's just the tip of the iceberg; habitat loss and degradation are the largest causes of massive declines in the numbers of birds.

Although we cannot witness these declines on a given day, citizen-science participants have contributed decades of data that point to truly alarming declines. Data from the Breeding Bird Survey show that Rusty Blackbirds, for example, have declined by 95% since the 1960s, indicating a loss of tens of millions of birds. Data from Project FeederWatch show that Evening Grosbeaks have also declined rangewide since the 1980s.

Don't underestimate the power of bird watchers to "witness" and document the large-scale declines that might otherwise go undetected until it's too late. With your help, the Cornell Lab and other organizations are working hard to monitor bird species and address the root causes of decline. Check out www.ebird.org for more information on how you can help document bird observations.

Converting Palm Oil Companies from Forest Destroyers into Forest Protectors

By Jeremy Hance and Rhett Butler from Mongabay.com

In efforts to save the world's remaining rainforests great hopes have been pinned on "degraded lands" — deforested lands that are presently sitting idle in tropical countries. Optimists say shifting agriculture to such lands will help humanity produce enough food to meet growing demand without sacrificing forests and biodiversity and exacerbating social conflict. But to date, degraded lands remain an enigma, especially in Indonesia, where deforestation continues at a rapid pace. Degraded lands are often misclassified by various Indonesian ministries—land in a far-off province may be listed as "wasteland" by Jakarta, but in reality is blanked by verdant forest that sequesters carbon, houses wildlife, and affords communities with food, water, and other essentials. Granting logging and plantation concessions on these lands can result in conflict and environmental degradation.

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Losing Nature's Medicine Cabinet

By Jeremy Hance
Mongabay.com

In all the discussions of saving the world's biodiversity from extinction, one point is often and surprisingly forgotten: the importance of the world's species in providing humankind with a multitude of life-saving medicines so far, as well as the certainty that more vital medications are out there if only we save the unheralded animals and plants that contain cures unknown. Already, species have provided humankind everything from quinine to aspirin, from morphine to numerous cancer and HIV-fighting drugs.

"As the ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin commented, the history of medicine can be written in terms of its reliance on and utilization of natural products," physician Christopher Herndon told mongabay.com. Herndon is co-author of a recent paper in the journal Biotropica, which calls for policy-makers and the public to recognize how biodiversity underpins not only ecosystems, but medicine.

"Our dependence today on nature for health has not diminished as significantly as commonly presumed. Over the past quarter century, more than half of all pharmaceuticals brought to market were directly derived from or modeled after compounds from other species," Herndon explains.

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Cuba opens Cuban Bird Banding Centre

On July 17th, 2010, the Johann Christoph Gundlach Cuban Bird Banding Centre (CBBC) was officially opened. The banding centre was opened in commemoration of the Johann Christoph Gundlach bicentenary, a German naturalist regarded as the third discoverer of Cuba ,

The CBBC is located at the Siboney-Jutic¡ Ecological Reserve, managed by the Eastern Centre of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (BIOECO) in Santiago de Cuba .

The main goals of this permanent banding centre are to study Cuban birds moult patterns, postnatal dispersion, sex ratios and life expectancy, to obtain survival estimates and to assess the importance of Cuban habitats for bird migration. We also aim at creating a data base that could help ornithologists and conservationists from Cuba , the Caribbean basin and North America to better preserve this key resource we share: birds.

This initiative is part of the Cuban efforts to implement the Caribbean Biological Corridor together with Haiti and the Dominican Republic , and we expect that in the future the CBBC serves as a training facility for young ornithologists and conservationists from the region. The rings used at the CBBC are the first labelled rings used in Cuba with the name of a Cuban institution (BIOECO) and the name of the country ( CUBA ).

Feeders & Breeders

In a surprise, extra birdfeed produces fewer chicks.

From Conservation Magazine: That tube of seed in your backyard may not necessarily be helping prop up bird populations. In an unexpected result, British researchers found that feeding some birds through the breeding season actually reduced reproduction rates. The finding could have implications for efforts to aid endangered species by supplementing their diet.

Researchers have been studying the impact of bird feeding on wild populations for decades. Few studies, however, have looked at how long-term feeding affects reproduction. To find out, a team led by S. James Reynolds of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom decided to offer free food to birds living in the Chaddesley Woods National Nature Reserve, a 101-hectare woodland in Worcestershire.

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